1. Field
The present disclosure relates to transmission of notifications, and more particularly, to methods and systems for transmitting a plurality of notifications in a notification pool.
2. Background
Businesses and governmental entities, including municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of notifications to their staff, citizens and family members of students to keep these constituencies apprized of important events, and sometimes of emergencies. For example, a school principal might need to inform the parent of every child that the school will be closed the next day due to some unforeseen event such as flooding, fire, or freezing conditions. Such notifications might be sent to telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (e-mail), and/or text messages. These notifications will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, or in the immediacy with which they must be sent. Regardless of these varying factors, as a practical matter, each notification being transmitted is typically placed in a linear queue by the processing system sending these notifications. The processing system may then send the notifications to a provider who specializes in transmitting them. Such provider may use, for example, a first-in-first-out (FIFO) rule or last-in-first-out (LIFO) to determine the sequence of transmission.
One of the shortcomings found to exist in the system described is that if 10,000 notifications are placed into a queue that is configured for FIFO and then a subsequent batch of 100 notifications is placed into the queue, the 10,000 notifications would all have to be processed from the queue prior to the 100 notifications being processed. But some of the 100 notifications in the later batch may be extremely urgent, whereas many of the 10,000 notifications may be non-urgent. The systems of the prior art may require that all 10,000 notifications issue before any of the 100 notifications, including the urgent notifications within the 100 notifications. This is a disadvantageous outcome.
It has further been found that current mass notification systems may exacerbate problems that the system is put into operation to solve. For example, in an area where telecommunications equipment has been degraded by a cause such as a hurricane or tornado, current transmission systems may overload and flood telecommunications networks and thereby actually prevent the distribution of pertinent information. Moreover, such overloading may have the potential to block necessary agencies (Red Cross, Police, Fire, etc.) from utilizing those telecommunications channels for communicating.